Warner Music CEO believes DRM was a mistake

The CEO of Warner Music who as many know usually for being one of the forefathers of current DRM practices, Edgar Bronfman said in a statement that he feels the music industry may have made a mistake in waging war on file sharing. He stated that the music industry as a whole has to take the blame for the increase in P2P file sharing.

"We used to fool ourselves," said Bronfman. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won."

Bronfman went on to state that mobile operators risk the same and fewer than 10% of mobile owners actually buy music on their mobile devices, most of these being ringtones.

"The sad truth is that most of what consumers are being offered today on the mobile platform is boring, banal and basic," he said. "People want a more interesting form of mobile music content. They want it to be easy to buy with a single click - yes, a single click, not a dozen. And they want access to it, quickly and easily, wherever they are. 24/7. Any player in the mobile value chain who thinks they can provide less than a great experience for consumers and remain competitive is fooling themselves."

Further within his statement he embraced what he had once criticized and stated that mobile companies need to take a look at Apple's business model and learn from their practices. "For years now, Warner Music has been offering a choice to consumers at Apple's iTunes store the option to purchase something more than just single tracks, which constitute the mainstay of that store's sales. By packaging a full album into a bundle of music with ringtones, videos and other combinations and variation we found products that consumers demonstrably valued and were willing to purchase at premium prices. And guess what? We've sold tons of them. And with Apple's co-operation to make discovering, accessing and purchasing these products even more seamless and intuitive, we'll be offering many, many more of these products going forward."

During his statement, it appeared that Bronfman had reached his own epiphany about digital music and the DRM practices that are forced upon it. He's gone from threatening to withdraw from iTunes and suggested that dropping DRM practices would be without logic to praising Apple on their recent DRM-free section of iTunes.

like it matters, drm is big business and sucks money away from the artists back to the riaa, who are the big studios themselves that are making and employing the drm in the first place so its a win win situation for them.

the riaa studios keep demanding more money for them, and less for the artists and composers this is the problem. why was sony's rootkit used i wonder?

the easy solution is not to purchase any media made by members of the riaa and who is these anti consumer companies you ask! well it's, SONY, UNIVERSAL, WARNER GROUP & EMI.

This message has been edited since its posting. Latest edit was made on 15 Nov 2007 @ 14:04

hey must understand that DRM effects their bottom line more than piracy ,without the overhead to run DRM,patching its mistakes and loss of consumers to it they would be making a profit off it instead of not getting anyway.

I guess he 'just discovered' that DRM goes over like a turd in a punch bowl !!. The entertainment industry is so stupid that they expect the government to do the job they won't do. Just to illustrate some of the arrogance the entertainment industry has: Here in Florida the governor is advocating spending almost a billion dollars for two sports stadiums. I say that the owners of the sports teams NOT THE TAXPAYERS should pay the full price to build the stadiums. Its time for corporate welfare to go away. Its also time to eliminate the feed trough for all special interests by taking away their source of income. This elimination includes ALL of them whether conservative or liberal. I'm sure that all the members of this forum would like to take home all of the money they work for. Instead the government thinks that it knows how to spend our money better than we do. Look at government. Social Security A JOKE, has been for 60 plus years. Great Society and War on poverty; 40 plus years throwing 3 trillion dollars down a rat hole. The solution: The Fair Tax or national retail sales tax. All embedded,income, and social security taxes eliminated. A person makes $ 500 a week, they take home $ 500. This means that the person earning the money has control of how much money they pay in taxes. This means that special interests like the entertainment industry are booted from the trough.